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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the kitesurf 365 podcast.
- [00:04]
B
Welcome back to the show. I hope you all had a great weekend. DK returns for another techcast where he reacts to the Ralph Grossell tour. We chat about Andrea and Hill going to smaller brands, and I offer DK a chatgpt challenge. Sit back and enjoy this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, Dave K.
- [00:31]
A
It feels to me like it's only been like a week since we did the last one of these. Like it's seriously, like it's. But it's, it's like this. You've been that busy, Deacon. I did. It's ridiculous. It's absolutely ridiculous. And like, we'll cover some stuff in this, in this podcast. I think this is actually going to be a really interesting topic, but Ralph and I are both working on similar concepts right now, but there's a contrast in how those are structured and scale and all that sort of thing. The end goals seem very similar conceptually, but the scale and I was pulling cables through ceilings this week. I doubt Ralph's wiring up his workshop.
- [01:12]
B
Let's get into it. Dk, we'll start with this man. Dk, good to see you again. As we. Wow, you've already heard. We've already started this podcast, but we will get out some questions. Guys, we've been incredibly busy. We will get out some questions. I have seen that there's some questions on Kite Forum and dk, you've brought those up to me. So the people are writing on Kite Forum. We will address those next week. I was just sitting on the toilet like 20 minutes ago before this and I thought, let me ask Chat GTP and that's come up with some great questions. So I think next week, the next episode, dk, we'll do those Kite four on ones and we're going to do DK versus Chat gdp. I think that'll be. I think that could be quite funny.
- [01:47]
A
I am, I'm so up for that challenge. I'm also so up to getting my ass kicked. But that's, that's fine.
- [01:53]
B
I guess we can give it the questions and give it the answers and we'll go. Your answer versus Chat gdp. That, that could be quite funny. You know, you and I thought about, you know, covering the Ralph Grossel episode, but there's been a lot happening in this industry and I, I wanted to ask you about it in particularly big name riders going to smaller brands. Andrea Pri off to rd. I know RD is a legendary brand, but you wouldn't consider it one of the bigger brands. These days and then heel v off to Vantage. Another interesting kite brand that is based in technology and based in sort of different ways of doing stuff opposed to the traditional methods. What was your thoughts when you heard about these guys?
- [02:33]
A
For a brand to get to the size of Duotone it's an interesting. From a product developer's side of things like from my side of things. What truly takes a brand from being a medium sized brand like into being that top tier can be argued probably Duotone's number one core is in most major markets is probably number two. Like they are seriously the two biggest brands in the world. The design and technology side of things has to be really good. But where they invest their money and their time and their effort is in marketing and distribution. The engineering manager is not number two in those organizations. Like there's the CEO and the second the person with the biggest budget and the biggest say is typically the marketing or the sales guy, not the engineering manager. The engineering manager for most part is considered an expense. An expense that they'd like to be able to do away with. They will spend the money on the marketing and business side can be argued the top 10 brands in terms of engineering or design performance. It moves around a little bit. But like a Slingshot NXT is an absolutely amazing kite and competes head to head with the Duotone Evo D Lab. You go ask the pro riders. There are going minor points. But the Rebel D lab sells orders of magnitude more than the Slingshot nxt. Bigger marketing budget, bigger distribution channel. So where that comes back to with the riders if you're as a rider if you really wanting to push you really want to develop new gear or one you. When you're in a top tier brain you're in a dominantly a marketing and sales organization. It also has to be for the most part it has to be conservative because it has to work like they're not generally companies that are have a lot of they can't veer off from from a path that's actually going to sell because they need to sell at least as many kites as last year. They can't do something a radical change because the risks are too high. Like it has to be as good as last year with a little incremental change. It can't be a completely different different side. So if you're a writer or if you predominantly what you're interested in is new develop a new development and we're changing things you it can get quite stifling being in brands of brands like that and you're also. You tend to be a voice in a very, very large organization. So you don't tend to have a huge amount of influence because you just can't. Like, if you consider the writers to be employees of the company and part of their work is for the marketing department, part of their work is for the R and D department, you might only be, you're a rider in a team of 10 riders inside a team of 10 developers who also have. There's maybe a team of five or 10 marketing people, five or so salespeople. Suddenly your voice is like one in 20, one in 30. We're in a small brand. You might be like, Andrea is definitely 100% the most important voice when it comes to design feedback with an RRD. And Hill is now definitely 100% the most important feedback when it comes to Vantages R D. And Hill said it in the recent podcast as well, is like the guys at Vantage were telling him, like, if, if there's another kite that you want to fly for a particular comp that's not ours, go for it. Like, we don't have a problem with that. If there's a. If you want to ride a different board because our board doesn't currently perform for you, we want you to perform to the best of your abilities. We don't, we don't have to have you having a Advantage logo on every little piece of equipment that you have on every single shot so that we can maximize your marketing. When you've got a contract with a business like Duozone, like if you need to ride somebody else's piece of equipment, you need to go to some far off desert place and you get to ride it for five minutes and there has to be no cameras because there can be no evidence that you might even test something that's not our, not their equipment. When you move out of business that's like massively invested in marketing and the business side into one that's primarily focused on making the best possible equipment. And you go from being 1 in 20 to 1 in 3 or 4, your influence goes up much higher. As long as those guys are getting the reward they need to live, they are probably much more excited about what their influence is and what they can get at. Like being part, being part of a much more, much smaller and much more design focused businesses. Good on them. I'm really excited for both of them.
- [08:01]
B
It's interesting though, right? Because I don't think RD would give Andrea the same freedom. Like Vantage is a distinctly smaller brand than rd, right? I mean let's be honest. I mean let's say it's a legacy brand rather than a big brand. Even heard Roberto saying, hey, Andre's kites, we're only going to make 50. It's going to be a smaller run on those kites to start, you know, so quite different.
- [08:21]
A
Sorry DK just with rrd they're relatively small in kiting but they're not a small operation. It's a big company and particularly the whole clothing side of the business went absolutely ballistically massive outside of anything to do with the water sports equipment. And Roberto in particular is a very savvy businessman on that side of things and so like he uses all of his athletes is as models in the clothing brand and, and very much ties the clothing brand back to the lifestyle across all the different sports. So yeah, I agree that he's not. Andrea is not likely to get be told, oh, you can go and use whatever kite you want in the next competition I don't think. But, but he's still it. There aren't. There aren't three or four other. Well, in fact if you're riding Duotone and you go to any of the majors, there's at least four other Duotone riders in the same comp as you. Andrea for the most part is going to be the only one on his kai which, which yeah, that's it. And the only. He's the major focus of the whole brand. That's. That's a really good place to be.
- [09:40]
B
Yeah, interesting moves, right? Moving away from bigger brands to smaller brands. Maybe it's a sign of the industry and I guess we won't see the sort of longevity to this till down the line, let's be honest. You know, down the line we're going to see if this was a success, you know, with heel. We've seen this happen with Ocean Rodeo in the past, went there and you know, let's be honest, man, he'll gave Ocean Rodeo a big kick in the butt. I saw Ocean Rodeo kites being bought. I knew guys who went out and bought Ocean Rodeo kites. How are they going to quantify how many RD kites or vantage kites are sold on the back of these big signings? We won't know till a year later.
- [10:16]
A
Yeah, completely. There's other like I think if you talk to rude a boards getting, getting Jamie riding his board has completely revolutionized his business. He's like tiny little, tiny little new new board brand based in, based in Holland and suddenly arguably one of the best riders the sport's Ever produced chooses to ride your board and the whole thing's blowing up. It's like they're everywhere. And I was actually talking to the guys just recently and that they're completely maxed on capacity, which is fantastic. Like, absolutely fantastic in terms of they're a bit like able to sell every possible board they can make right now, which is like, that's awesome. And it's. And it does come down to top tier. Riders do sell product, but it has to be good product as well. But Ocean Rodeo were a brand that has been selling kiteboarding equipment. They weren't nowhere when Hill.
- [11:24]
B
No, no, no.
- [11:24]
A
Sure, sure, yeah. What they were was they were a brand for tech heads. Ocean Rodeo were always kind of experimenting with stuff that was on the fringes. So the stuff that like the big brains really can't, like they can't afford to invest in it because they can't afford. They can't afford the risks. Ocean Rodeo were always, always doing things that were a little bit left field and they had a following of people who just really enjoyed that. But. And Alula came out of that. Hey, we're doing, we're doing. We're happy to invest in stuff that was left field. And getting Hill on board at basically the same time as the rise came out, they tied it all together. That business just took off. So marketing does sell equipment. The bigger the brand gets, the more the marketing becomes more important than the engineering. And I love the engineering, so I'm happy to play in the smaller side of the business at some point though. Engineering is all great and all, but you actually need somebody to market your stuff to do really well. And actually there's a very classic one with us where arguably the best marketer of our time, of our. At least you're in I's lifetime has been with Steve Jobs. He was nothing else but a marketing guru. Steve Jobs would have had nothing to market if he hadn't had a friend called Steve Wozniak. And Steve Wozniak was the engineer that created the Apple one and then the Apple ii. And that gave the greatest marketer of our time something to go out and market and created Apple, which became actually several times in its history the biggest company in the world. So you can be the greatest engineer in the world, but you really need to partner with somebody who's actually going to sell your wares if you want to be as big as possible. Arguably now though, you get to a point when you get so like companies get so big that they can't be that Little they can't innovate. Like the guy sitting in the garage who has almost no risks but has a big idea and just enough resources to put it together themselves.
- [13:41]
B
If you haven't seen the movie BlackBerry, go check it out guys. It's actually kind of interesting. It's the sort of BlackBerry versus iPhone. Well, this is before Samsung came on. It's sort of the precursor to Samsung stepping up to, well, let's say Android opposed to the iPhone. Anyway, check that out. Dk, let's move on to something I wanted to ask you about. You know, a lot of people have been messaging me about the, the RALPH interview in particularly when I brought up the point that I saw a kite that looked like it had been made in polished aluminium or that type of color, you know, and he sort of, he sort of laughed and said, well you weren't supposed to see that. And then he went back on and said, you know, we can make this material and then go check it out. I asked him about looms. He doesn't have the looms. How was he making this material? Is this, is he using like a settling agent on the same type of weave that all materials are based.
- [14:36]
A
So I like. There was a couple of things that, that I took out of that part of the interview. First one, that's the silver material he was talking about. He described it as being the stiffest material that they've ever built a kite out of and that they were getting failures in places they'd never seen failures before, literally because the stuff was so stiff. But your description of something that looked like completely silver, I think I said aluminium at the time, aluminum looked like that, you know, so way back in 2007, 2008, best kite boarding, with lack of good testing, released a kite called the Hellfish. And the Hellfish was a complete disaster because of lack of testing. It. It exploded in ways that it like every one of them that was made ended up failing in some spectacular way and they had to warranty the whole lot. There was only a small number made but it was a. It's. It got a lot of press initially for being really light and then a lot of press for, for failure, for spectacular failures. But the fabric that Hellfish was made out of was a non woven Dyneema fabric. So Dyneema, the company that makes all of the fiber that makes our kite line, our ultra high molecular weight polyethylene fibers, that is Dyneema's primary business. And I'm not sure if they own the fabric business anymore, if they've divested the fabric business. But the dyneema in the 2000s at least was making some very experimental, very, very strong fabrics using laminates of non woven Dyneema. So basically a just random orientation of Dyneema fabric laminated between a couple of, a couple of layers of film. And one of those layers of film had an aluminiumized finish on it. And that was what was used on the Hellfish. So my suspicion when you, or my immediate thought when you described a kite covered in aluminum is Ralph's been playing around with some of those Dyneema non wovens. And his description of them also kind of lines up with what I'd expect from that fabric. It's incredibly stiff and it's. Because it's a non woven, it's incredibly, it's, it's incredibly stiff in all directions. Which woven fabric is stiff in kind of two orientations and quite flexible in the other two orientations. So that's kind of what I'm thinking is they've been playing around with that. You ask about him doing in house fabrics and he was talking about laminates. So when I worked for Pride Group, Pride Group had, so Cabrinha was part of Pride Group. Pride Group had its own factory just over the border in China. Sitting in the ground floor of building one was the xply machine. So an xply is the laminate fabric or laminated material that all the windsurf cells were being made out of. And Pride Group were making their own X ply in house. Absolutely massive machine. Like the thing was probably 20 meters long and about 7 or 8 meters high, probably 4 or 5 meters wide. And you would feed in two layers of very thin polyester film. And the machine would automatically lay reinforcement fibers in programmed directions on the inside of those films and then glue the two together. And Ralph's talking about that it's unlikely that he'll be doing any woven material development in house. But he was talking about doing, he was talking about laminates being what he's looking at towards the future. And he was talking about being able to make custom materials in house. Highly suspect that he's talking about investing in doing some sort of in house lamination where you can program the orientation of all of the fibers that go between those two laminate films. So you can custom make, custom make a fabric in house, test it. And he's, and he described doing it being able to build a kite in two days, which is just a dream for anyone who's doing for any kite designer, being able to get a new prototype in two days. But he's talking about getting that prototype in two days with a custom fabric in it. That's definitely next level. And that's why he's invested prime, firstly invested in a development lab. So it's not just about getting prototypes really quick. But let's. If we've got a space and the people, can we put in machinery to actually create our own fabrics? I've got no other evidence apart from his interview, but that's me sort of drawing the lines together of what he was talking about.
- [20:01]
B
Yeah. If you haven't heard that interview, I do want to reference that it was on the leading edge only of the kite. Just to, just to go back, if you haven't listened to those RALPH ones, go check it out. Because this might not mean anything, but he has two facilities now. One is the lab, which has minimal production side to it, so they can turn it around. And then once it's perfected, that goes over to the manufacturing lab, which is a. Which he's using the word duplication. Interesting that he said that. He said this is a place where it's for duplication only. When it comes here, it should be ready to be duplicated only. I thought that was interesting. And the other thing that was interesting, DK was, he was talking about like, the people who work in the duplication lab, they're very skilled in one skill, whether they're seamstress seas or whatever. But the people who work in the lab almost need to be multi skilled, need to be able to be free, think and think around stuff. I, I found that quite interesting to hear.
- [20:54]
A
Yeah, yeah, he was, he, he mentioned it. He's like, he's saying typically in the development lab he's got about six people do all of the processes. So if he delivers a prototype design file, there's about six people that touch that design from the start of the process to the end of the process. And that makes perfect sense to me. He says in the production facility, it's about 100 people to do the same process. But those hundred people, like the six people are doing multiple parts of the kite and multiple different processes across that one kite. The hundred people you bought like. And that's pretty typical of production. You boil down, you boil the whole process down into the smallest possible units and then you have one person touch that, that particular part of the process. One machine with one type of, type of process with one person. And then you string a hundred of those together and you start by printing the fabric at one end and packing the kite into A into a bag at the other, and everywhere in between, there are individual people just doing one little process on the. On the kite makes perfect sense. And it also, like those six people that are in the development lab, that's a much smaller, much tighter team. You can get much quicker feedback. You can ask them to do things that are not. That are completely different to what's currently being done in production. And their job is just to do it. They won't question it. They just know that it doesn't matter. Like, if it works. If it doesn't work, it doesn't matter where. It's more important for us to actually ch. To be ready to change, because then we can eventually, if we find something that's better, that will get shipped across to production.
- [23:05]
B
Dk, if Ralph said to you, dave, sue, you can have one week in my lab, I'll be there to oversee it, to make sure that you've got one week where you've got 100% support from BrainChild. What would you two work on? Where. Where would you think the development where. What would you two. What would you two work on and what development would you bring over to Lacuna?
- [23:33]
A
I don't know enough, actually. Like, I'd literally have to go in there and I doubt Ralph will ever let me in there because I'm the worst. The worst nightmare of a person to have on your factory floor, especially in your development lab. I would need to see what's there and then work out what to apply it to. So if the, like, the discussions about laminates is an interesting one for us, though, probably there is a thing with Lacuna, at least where Lacuna is right now is we're actually 100% dedicated to like, a. And we've. We're open about this with our brand. Our recipe that we currently have, we'd argue, is kind of like the heaviest kite on the market right now, which is kind of. And we're actually super happy with that heavy construction because it gives us, like, our differentiation is, hey, we're probably the only kite brand left in the world that's still making kites or in a. In a construction recipe that's at least as strong as what was being done 10 years ago. Everything else right now is actually being built. There's just an obsession with making them lighter and lighter. We don't believe you're actually getting the increase in performance that you're getting from that is completely offset with the lower lifespan that you're getting out of that equipment. So we want to keep the lifespan and use our design to get to push the performance of it rather than just make it lighter and the lifespan plummets. So the brainchild factory is though it has some really, really awesome tech in it. It's not primarily. That tech's not primarily interesting to what we're doing with lacuna because we've got a, we've got a. More than proud to say that we're actually trying to be the opposite of what that factory is trying to achieve. However, for some of our third party clients, there could be some very, very interesting things in there. First and foremost, I absolutely love the printing technology and I'd love to do some really interesting things with the, the how the prints are applied and how they like and how they flow across the kite. I think I've been playing with my software on that side of things. And then if Ralph is getting into laminated materials, definitely I'd, I'd be very curious to make some, some kites with laminated, with custom made laminate, especially on the, all the inflated parts. So. But yeah, I doubt that would be a lacuna thing. That would be. Oh, one of my other clients would be, hey, we've done this thing. Would you be interested in it? Which happens a lot around here.
- [26:33]
B
So check out this printing on this kite. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna. We're not gonna say the name, but check out, check out what's written there. Look at the spelling of that. Is that the way it run for you?
- [26:45]
A
Oops.
- [26:47]
B
Dude, this is one of the biggest brands on the planet. How could they get that wrong? I'm not going to say the words because it might actually give it away. But isn't that ridiculous?
- [26:58]
A
Adrian, it's harder than you can possibly than most people actually want to get spelling right. This industry, at least from our perspective. So you and I, we're both kiwis, so we're white native English speaking guys in their 50s. As far as social media feedback flows to us, the kiteboarding is all English.
- [27:22]
B
Okay, yeah, yeah, sure, yeah.
- [27:24]
A
The thing being is actually it's much more international and there's much more. There are many more languages in our industry and not everybody who's developing the equipment is actually English first language. It's first problem. But I've actually had the opposite issue. I've worked for brands where I've had to go back and berate as a product manager, I've had to go back and berate the, the graphic design people for being just like absolutely rude to our non English speaking customers. In writing the size of a board in American, spelling English on the board and not printing the numbers. And I'm like, you can do that if you want to, guys, but you have to put the numbers above it. Because more than 50% of our customers can't read that. They have no idea what size they're looking at on the board if you print it in English. And even worse than that, the 40 was spelled in American, not in American English, which is just going to be even harder. So you may laugh at that picture you sent me of that spelling mistake, but. But I fully understand where it comes from. Like, it's. It's. And it's actually, it's a bunch. It's very, very hard to 100% catch all of that every time. Like, I've seen ridiculous spelling mistakes on. On brands, websites and stuff. And it's like, even though they've got probably a staff of 10 people that were just told to go and proofread the whole site before it was. Before it was released. So. Yeah, so, yeah, but come back. The printing process. Yeah, there'll be some very, very cool things to do with that. And I'd really, really be keen to do some custom laminates. The custom laminate stuff that Ralph alluded to is 100% applicable to this composite labs that I'm sitting in as well. Like, I would dearly love to be able to, rather than buying off the shelf woven fabrics to do the reinforcement in our boards, I would absolutely love to be able to do 3D printed, for want of a better word, or print my own laminate reinforcement patterns and then laminate those into our boards. So to be able to choose where every single fiber goes into the board and which way it's pointing is the ultimate for me as a. As a board designer. It can be argued that the fabrics on our kites are composites. They're just a different thickness with slightly different materials.
- [30:06]
B
When listening to Ralph talk about his facility, how much can you relate to that? Because, I mean, like I said the other day, you guys are at completely different ends of the scale. Right. I mean, this is. He has a lot of money invested in his project. You and sue are funding this project yourself, arguably doing very, very similar things. Maybe he's not doing. You're not doing the production like he's doing. But also you have labs where you're experimenting, where you're designing, where you're playing around. You talked about being able to turn out a new twin tip within a week, a couple of days, you know, so it is very similar, but slightly
- [30:45]
A
different sort of scaled productions from a designer. A designer creating their prototypes. Point of view, identical goals. The exact same reason why Ralph's built the brainchild and prototyping facility is exactly why sue and I are building Red Sky Lab. That and neither of us would argue. Neither. None of the three of us would argue any different. Like it is about controlling your ability to do your own development work and to be able to do it rapidly with no restrictions. Only difference is number of zeros on the end of all the bills.
- [31:31]
B
I'm sure Ralph's not living in the. Living in the, in the warehouse either,
- [31:34]
A
you know, and I'm absolutely certain he's not. Yeah, he's not the. He's not installing the bench building and installing his own bench tops and is about, about to queue up the floor. And sue actually. Ridiculous. Sue's been spending like, like the last couple of weeks doing nothing but reconditioning the windows in the office space. Ridiculously big job. Yeah. But yeah, we do it ourselves. The difference, literally the difference between what Ralph's like the only conceptual difference between what Ralph's doing with at least his lab and what we're doing here is investment is the level of investment. Sue and I have all like, we're the ultimate bootstrappers. We like the idea being here is it's just the two of us and we own it outright. Like that's. That means like we're. Our only responsibility is to ourselves. You can. Getting outside investment gives you economic horsepower. Like we could have got, could have sold the idea of this lab to somebody and got a couple of million dollars and built a brand new building and fully booked it out with every piece of machinery I could possibly think of. But I would be the owner or it would be my title or actually sue would be the owner and I'd be her employee. But we were. When you bring in outside investment, you have a duty, responsibility to those outside investors and that ultimately they need a return. So your level of pressure and commitment and your risks are that much higher.
- [33:21]
B
I mean, look, look what happened to Ocean Rodeo when they, you know, Alula became the floated partner. OceanReady became a part of Alula and as soon as New Control took over, they just, they just flogged that dead. Well, not say not dead. They just flogged that asset. Well, they got rid of the assets they don't want.
- [33:38]
A
Well, it was so Richard, Richard, who was the original owner of Ocean Rodeo and Ross and actually a whole bunch of other staff came from Ocean Rodeo into the publicly listed company that was Alula. And then once they had, once they had they were a publicly traded company, the shareholders replaced the CEO who then just shifted every. Like all of those old. I think Ross is still there because he's like, he's part of the important tech but everybody else, they're out. So you don't, you at some point you don't own it when you like you get financial horsepower when you have outside investment but you also, you've sold off part of what you're doing to somebody else. You don't have full control over it and your stress levels are that much higher. The nice thing is probably Ralph's able to draw a salary. His hobby is racing his Porsche race car. I don't have a hobby like that.
- [34:45]
B
Your hobby's fixing the 30 year old print he just bought.
- [34:49]
A
Ah yeah, the CNC machine. The barn fied CNC machine this week actually did a couple of cutting jobs. Super stoked like that was quite a milestone. And then last night I started. I've built a. This will go over the top of most all the listeners but I've done something completely ridiculous. There's some peripheral machines that hook up to the main CNC machine. One's the vacuum hold down pump which is used to hold material, especially board cores down onto the bed of the machine. Means you don't have to have any clamps or screws or anything.
- [35:24]
B
Is that done by suction?
- [35:25]
A
Is it vacuum dumpling? You have a big vacuum pump that pulls vacuum on the bottom of the board and that holds it down, just allows you to machine everywhere. It's a very effective system. But it's a big motor, 7.5 kilowatt motor to do that. And then there's also a dust extracting system. So you have a, in this case it's a 1 1/2 kilowatt double bag dust extractor that is just a big vacuum cleaner that's attached onto the head of the machine and sucks all the dust away. And all of those are going in an outside shed here. If I wasn't me, like both those machines would just have little push button motor starters sitting on the wall in the shed that they're in. And when I'd wake up in the morning like I'd go in and I'd just press a button and that start. But that's way too simple for a guy that's like got a degree in motor control. And so I've built this big control panel specifically for those, for those machines. It's kind of justifiable for the vacuum pump. And it's totally ridiculous overkill for the dust extractor to have a full variable frequency drive running. Like running a 1 1/2 kilowatt dust extractor. And all it does is just does a little ramp up. So instead of the thing just like starting it just it'll run up to full speed over 10 seconds. But I've put a whole like I'm going to have to run a whole communications cable out to that shed and I've got to add some extra control software to the panel of the CNC machine. I'll just have nice little soft push buttons where I can press on the control panel. And my big machinery, like all that vacuum machinery that's outside of the other shed is just going to do some nice lovely startup and stop sequences. That's just overkill. That's like putting.
- [37:18]
B
But why not decal? Why not?
- [37:20]
A
Well it's like putting really expensive mag wheels on your, on your work delivery truck. It's of no use at no practical use except it just shows off my skills. Like variable frequency drives are a thing of mine and all the cable park stuff that we do is all based around variable frequency drives. So it's kind of like this personal pride thing. Like if I have a motor in this workshop it has to be controlled properly. I can't just have old school contactor starters. So yeah, but I got the dust extractor up and running last night on that complete overkill of a system. And yeah, I've got like, I've got to get like we've been in this place six months now and I like I've only just done the first like little sign cut on the cnc. But all of my like I've got board design clients who have just got new development work that I've got to get into and I just this week signed up a new hydrofoil development contract which is super, super exciting to me as well. A complete new range of hydrofoils I've got to develop that's perfect like that. I'm in need that machine running. I can't do those contracts until it's running. So I'm hoping to be towards the end of this month actually be actually machining boards, machining hydrofoils. And if you keep an eye on my socials you'll see that that coming through. But yeah, it's getting really real and the office space is coming along really well. We will start putting the floor down in there in about a week or so. Which It'd be super nice. We're currently in this temporary office in the showroom and I just can't wait to be in my new office because it's just. It'll be the first time I've had a. Like a, like even back in DK Kiteboards factory, we were just. The office was just kind of one. Just a corner of the mezzanine floor. It wasn't nicely set up as an office. So, yeah, super exciting.
- [39:15]
B
Well, dk, let's leave that today and let's get excited about this next one. DK vs chat GTP. We will get to those myths, we will get to those questions on Kite FL him as well. I'll. I'll sort of put all those together for you, but yeah, thanks for your time, dk. I know that was just a quick one this week, but I am looking forward to this next one and I'm kind of annoyed that I didn't check out that Chat GTP option a few days ago because I'd like to put you on the spot today. But we, we'll give you a little bit of breathing time before next weekend. We'll go for it then. But mate, thanks again, DK for your time and man, stoked to hear that Rad sky is coming along. Super good. Interesting. Do you hear your feedback on Ralph and yeah, we'll see you next month.
- [39:51]
A
Thanks, Adrian, and thanks to all your listeners and yeah, well, I am definitely happy to have my ass kicked by ChatGPT if it, if it happens. But I'm up. But I'm up for the. I'm up for the challenge. So let's, let's see how that goes. Cheers, everyone.
- [40:05]
B
Guys, one last thing. If you do put questions into Kite forum for the techcast, just make sure you tag DK or myself. He's Kiteboard Shaper. I'm ark. Just so we. Otherwise, otherwise it's easy for me to miss it, you know. And having a running. I'm having a bit of a running issue with Kite for at the moment, mate. It's a great thing, by the way, but it's not an open forum because if you put anything that, anything in there that, that our mate Toby Bride doesn't support, he pulls it down, which is annoying because he pulled down that Vantage one. I mean it's, it's only pulled down of his forum. But it's a bit disappointing because I would like. And I put a lot of effort into those things and it's kind of annoying when I go up there and I see it's been pulled down, which is kind of bit disappointing. But it is what it is, you
- [40:47]
A
know, it is Toby's Toby's Empire do what he wants. Exactly.
- [40:52]
B
Some people Some people be the same about me and you, bro.
- [40:55]
A
You know. Oh totally Totally. Oh we I, I think we we're happy to talk about talk about all comers here. So even the fact that I own own my own brand and I'm happy to talk about and my own development lab, but I'm happy to give give Ralph props. I, I, I hope our listeners appreciate that.
- [41:12]
B
So hey guys, I hope you enjoyed that episode. Don't forget, if you want to support the show, the easiest way is to support us for free. Rate me on Spotify. I'm loving those five star reviews. Share them in your local WhatsApp or kite surfing groups. If you want to support more regularly, head over to portraitkite.com and check out all the madness there. Portrait is an independent media company trying to tell the stories of kiteboarding the way we believe they should. These projects are funded by people just like you. If you believe in what we do and want to support us more than head over to portraitkite.com the podcast guys will always be free, so you don't need to worry about that. If you want to find more episodes just like this one, use the search button@kiteser365.com to search your favorite writer or topic. And we're going to be back this Thursday for the Megapod.